Mental Health – Page 6 – Purple and Green and the Life in Between

Pregnancy Fears, Hopes, and Strategies

Being pregnant is a huge undertaking for your body. It makes permanent changes to lots of areas, includes lots of discomfort and unpleasant experiences, and involves a decent amount of risk. It changes how you are viewed by society and how strangers interact with you. And it is (or can be) the first step in one of the biggest changes anyone can make in life – becoming a parent.

So of course I have all the typical fears:

How will my body change?
Risk of miscarriage (Ha! That already happened once)
Huge life change
Adverse symptoms for nine months such as nausea, fatigue, and joint pain
Birth trauma
Postpartum depression and isolation

Pregnancy is also one of the most feminizing experiences a person can have. So, as a nonbinary person, I also have gender related fears:

Will my sense of where my gender is on the spectrum shift in unpredictable ways due to hormones?
Will my social dysphoria increase to unbearable levels due to the quintessential feminization of my body?
Will my physical dysphoria increase due to my chest getting bigger and my pregnant belly?
Will I struggle to find clothes that fit me that are not hyper-feminine like typical maternity clothes are?

But on the other side of my fears is what I hope for:

My gender identity will shift to the more feminine side of my range like it does during my period and result in minimal dysphoria with pregnancy changes
I will have fewer physical discomfort symptoms than I am expecting
Many of my current clothes will fit throughout pregnancy since I prefer looser clothes to begin with (though they will end up being more fitted as I get bigger)

Now that I have actually been pregnant once, for a short time, and only in the first trimester phase before the hyperfeminization of my body happened, some of these fears and hopes have shifted. I now know, or am more confident that my gender will shift to the female side for some or all of my pregnancy. Hopefully this will help with the social and physical dysphoria.

But this caused another area of discomfort: feeling like I was missing half of who I was. And after I had a miscarriage, my gender swung back to the male side with a resurgence of dysphoria that I was now unaccustomed to. You can read more about that in Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Gender. So I can now add ‘postpartum dysphoria’ to my list of fears.

Here are some strategies I’ve come up with to help me through this process:

Look for alternative maternity clothing stores or just buy larger sized clothing from cheaper places
Come out to as many people as I am comfortable with so that I have lots of options of people to hang out with in a gender affirming environment to combat social dysphoria and invisibility/inauthenticity
Focus on the personal, wondrous, internal feeling of growing a life inside me
Be kind to myself post partum while I’m learning how to deal with dysphoria again and review my personal journals and previous blog posts about how I deal with it

If you have a similar identity to mine, I hope that sharing my thoughts and experiences with pregnancy will help you feel more comfortable in your skin or at least not so alone during this experience. If you have someone in your life who is pregnant, maybe this will help you understand that not everyone who looks pregnant identifies as female and what that might feel like.

Do you have any stories of your own or strategies that got you through pregnancy with dysphoria?

Do you have any questions or specific aspects of this experience that you are looking forward to hearing more about?

Leave a comment below! I’d love to hear from you.

Treating Your Body Well Can Help Manage Dysphoria

Sometimes for folks who experience dysphoria it feels like the only ways they experience their body are negative. This can easily lead to negative self-talk and the tendency to ignore the ways that our bodies help us navigate the world every day.

Dysphoria is not always predictable or manageable. It springs up at the worst times and can be extremely persistent. It can lead to a feeling of fighting with our bodies or feeling out of control. Our bodies become the focus of our negativity instead of dysphoria or the way we’re treated by others.

One way to combat all this negativity towards our own bodies is to treat our bodies well. Just like it feels better to come home to a clean and well maintained house, it feels better to live in a body that you are actively working to maintain and keep clean. This means eating well (as often as you can), drinking lots of water, getting enough exercise, and avoiding things like smoking and excessive alcohol. Not everyone needs to do all of these things, but even focusing on one of them can give you a positive connection to your body.

This strategy partly relies on the ‘fake it ’til you make it’ mentality. If I am taking care of my body and we typically only take care of things we care about, that must mean I care about my body. The other part of this strategy is that some of the habits, especially exercise, will help you experience your body in positive ways. Find types of exercise that work for you (see my post about going to the gym) and focus on how your body moves, how it responds to your instructions, and how it improves with ongoing care.

When I feel good about how I am treating my body, I feel proud of it. Even if it is a source of dysphoria. Even if it doesn’t match what I picture myself to be in my head. If I have been taking care of my body, on bad dysphoria days I have a better chance of redirecting my focus to positive aspects of my body.

Even if you want your body to be different, even if your body doesn’t move or look the way you want it to, it is still your body. It doesn’t suddenly become your body once it matches the image you have of yourself in your head, it has always been your body. If you are a man, it is the body of a man. If you are agender, your body is also agender. No matter what your identity and what society tells you your body should look like, your body is the vessel for your identity.

So treat it well. Build a positive relationship with your body and use that positive connection to fight your dysphoria. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up finding more ways to experience gender euphoria than you thought you had access to.

What are the ways that you take care of your body? How do those habits help you manage dysphoria? Leave a comment below!

Gender Experiments: Wearing a Dress

Yesterday, I tried on a dress for the first time since high school prom. I’d been thinking about doing this for a while. I had a dress in my closet that my sister had given me that I really liked the look of but had never tried on (sorry sis). It is navy blue with a pleated knee length skirt that looks like a kilt, wide shoulder straps, and a high round neck. I was listening to a podcast about drag performers and how liberating it can be to wear clothes that allow you to feel the full spectrum of your gender. So, when I was feeling the most female I have in a couple months, I drummed up the courage and did it.

I had so much fear about what I would look like and how it would make me feel. I worried that it would make me super dysphoric and dissociate from my body. I had this irrational image of myself with long hair and a dress and makeup as if just simply putting on a dress would suddenly transform me into the most feminine version of myself.

I took steps to mitigate any dysphoria that might happen. I wore sweatpants while I was putting it on. I had my black leather bomber jacket to wear over top. I had a chainmaille necklace that is my most masculine piece of jewelry to put on. And I planned to do a workout afterwards to reconnect with my body if necessary.

I’m glad I took all those precautions but as it turned out, I didn’t really need them. I put on the dress in a room with no mirrors. I didn’t burst into flames or tears. I didn’t dissociate from my body. I took off the sweatpants and moved around a bit, feeling the skirt against my legs. That was the weirdest part – the bare legs. I rarely even wear shorts in the summer so that was a strange feeling for more than just gender reasons. I put on my chainmaille necklace, put on my leather jacket, and stepped out into the hall to look in a mirror.

The person I saw in the mirror still looked like me. I still had short hair and hairy legs and broad shoulders. I had a strange mix of relief, intrigue, and discomfort. I took a few pictures, then tried it without the jacket. Still ok. I played around with the look a bit, then took it off and returned it to the closet and put my sweatpants and hoodie back on.

These types of experiments are emotional labour. They take work. This type of thing comes easier to some people than others. At this point in my gender journey I am much more comfortable exploring in the masculine direction than the feminine one so this was a big step for me. To see myself in a dress and still feel authentic, non-binary, genderqueer, was very affirming. It tells me that I am much more secure in my identity than I was eight months ago.

This gives me hope for even more difficult things in the future, like being pregnant. If I still look like myself while wearing a dress, maybe I will still look and feel like myself when I’m pregnant.

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What experiments have you tried when exploring your gender? What types of self-care do you find useful when doing these experiments? What have you been thinking about trying but haven’t found the courage to do yet? Let me know in the comments!

Educating Others Without Compromising Your Boundaries

Sometimes those of us with experience and knowledge of trans related topics want to help educate those around us and sometimes we don’t. And that’s ok. You should never feel like you have to compromise your own mental health for the sake of addressing someone else’s ignorance. But how do you politely tell people to bugger off and educate themselves through other means? And when you are comfortable having some of those conversations, how do you know what you’re comfortable sharing and what you’re not? How do you make them aware of your boundaries without derailing the conversation or damaging your relationship with that person?

Throughout my husband’s transition and my own gender explorations I have had many different conversations with many different types of people about gender and trans related topics. Many times towards the beginning of this process I was already knee deep in a conversation before I realized that I was well past the line that this person shouldn’t have crossed. I am a very open person and I am often comfortable sharing much more personal information with others than most people are so I wasn’t personally uncomfortable with the content. What concerned me more, and often only in retrospect, was that the person I was talking to had no awareness of which questions were appropriate and which ones they should have asked special permission for (and respected my response if I said no). If you have people in your life that have a similar lack of understanding of what is appropriate to ask about or say, see my post How to Interact Respectfully with a Trans Person, or, better yet, send that person the link.

How far do you go before you recommend resources and leave the conversation? That is completely up to you. Everyone will have different boundaries relating to their privacy depending on the type of information, their relationship to the other person/people in the conversation, and the setting where the conversation is taking place. Boundaries are healthy. They are self-protective. The more experiences we have that are threatening, the more self-protective we are likely to become.

The problem comes when you don’t know where your own boundaries are until they have been crossed. This can make you vulnerable, defensive, antagonistic, and can even put your safety at risk. Often, the other person/people in the conversation don’t even know they have crossed a line. Your sudden change in manner can be a shock to them and even to yourself.

How do you avoid this? Think about your boundaries in advance. Below are some guiding questions to get you started. I recommend you add to it any time you get asked a question that triggers a warning bell in your head. Revisit this exercise every few months, when you are nearing a major transition related event, or when you’re going to be interacting with people you haven’t seen in a while (family gatherings). For each question, try to answer it for a variety of different people in your life – a co-worker, a friend, a parent, your doctor, another member of the trans community, etc.

General Info: Are you comfortable…

disclosing your birth name?
explaining why you prefer the pronouns you use?
talking about your experiences of dysphoria?
talking about specific strategies you use to change your appearance or presentation (binding, packing, tucking, padding, etc)?
talking about how supportive your family, significant other, or other people in your life are?
talking about what support groups you attend/are a part of?
talking about wait times, difficulties finding a trans friendly family doctor, and other systemic barriers?

Medical Info: Are you comfortable…

talking about medication you are on related to transitioning?
talking about changes you are experiencing as a result of those medications?
disclosing what surgeries/surgery you are interested in having/have had?

Legal Info: Are you comfortable…

talking about legal documentation changes?
discussing transphobic politics and policies?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of topics that might come up related to your own or your partner’s transition or gender identity. If your partner is the one who’s information you would be sharing, go through this list with them so they can tell you what they are comfortable with you sharing with people in your life. My husband is typically a fairly private person (at least compared to me), but often had much looser boundaries when it came to me sharing info with my coworkers or friends if they were people that he was unlikely to interact with.

Now that you know your boundaries, what do you do or say when someone asks something that you are not comfortable talking about? Try saying exactly that – “Sorry, that isn’t something I’m comfortable talking about with you.” Another phrase I use a lot (because there is rarely something I’m actually not comfortable talking about with someone) is “That is not actually something you should typically ask about a trans person.” They usually respond with “Oh, really? I had no idea.” You can also add phrases such as “Thank you for your concern” or “Thanks for trying to learn more about my experiences/trans issues” or “If you want to learn more about that I would recommend [appropriate resource].”

So whose responsibility is it to do the educating? I believe that no amount of reading on the internet can substitute for face to face conversation and personal anecdotes. But that doesn’t mean that it is always up to the minority to educate the majority. People from or connected to the trans community should not be responsible for providing all necessary information to everyone around them (especially medical professionals). That would be more than exhausting. But you will need to provide the people in your life with enough information to get them from unconsciously ignorant to consciously ignorant and explain how important it is that they educate themselves further. It will also help if you can provide them with specific resources that speak to you. They are much more likely to absorb the information they are getting from other sources if they are confident that it is relevant to your experience.

What other topics or questions would you add to the list? How do your boundaries change depending on your situation or the person you’re talking to? What phrases do you use to identify your boundaries to other people? Was there a situation where you shared something that you realized in retrospect had crossed your personal boundary? Tell me what happened in the comments below!

6 Months of Self-Discovery

What I Knew at the Beginning

I have both male and female gender
I am more comfortable presenting gender neutral, tomboy, or androgynous
I’m pretty sure I experience dysphoria but I’m not sure what triggers it or what to do about it
Having my husband transition has given me the language and permission to explore my identity and has increased my discomfort at being perceived more feminine due to heteronormativity

Fears I Had

My dysphoria/discomfort would increase the more I focused on it.
I would discover that to be truly happy/whole I would need to use neutral pronouns and name and society wouldn’t be able to accommodate that.
That I would end up less comfortable than I was before starting this process.
That if I get to the point where I have to explain being non-binary to my family they would not understand.
That I would have to change jobs in order to feel comfortable.

Goals of Self Discovery

Identify how much my gender fluctuates.
Identify specific triggers of dysphoria and develop strategies to manage it on a daily basis.
Improve resilience, reduce fatigue, and generate a sense of wholeness.
Find ways to communicate my identity to others.

6 MONTHS LATER…

What I Know Now

I fluctuate between 50% female to 25% male (0 being equal amounts of each).
I have a significant amount of social dysphoria that is primarily triggered by female labels (ma’am, ladies, girl) and to a lesser extent by female pronouns (she/her).
I have a minimal to moderate amount of physical dysphoria, primarily related to chest and voice.
I am most comfortable when referred to using they/them pronouns and using the name Meaghan Ray (or having equal amount of time being identified as Ray as Meaghan).

Did My Fears Come True?

Yes, some days it feels like my dysphoria does get worse the more I focus on it. But the truth is, it is there regardless and I can either ignore it and have a vague sense of discomfort, frustration, irritability, fatigue, and lack of focus, or I can identify it for what it is, thus increasing my awareness of it but also improving my ability to address it or cope with it.
Yes, in order to live my best life I would prefer neutral pronouns 100% of the time and no, I don’t believe society (or at least my specific workplace) can accommodate that. But I also discovered that I am decently comfortable with female pronouns most days. It’s the other gendered terms that affect me more and that is something I might be able to address in the future.
No, I am definitely more comfortable now than I was before. I have significantly fewer symptoms of burnout and a ton more strategies to deal with bad dysphoria days.
I haven’t gotten to the point of coming out to my family. I have broached the subject in relation to correcting their assumptions about the binary and explaining a friend’s experience but have not discussed my own identity yet. I’m sure I will write a post about it when I do.
Changing jobs may or may not increase my comfort level. But I have become significantly more comfortable without changing jobs so I take that as a win.

Did I Achieve My Goals?

Yes, I very clearly identified how much my gender fluctuates using a chart I created which you can read about here.
Yes. Read about my physical and social dysphoria triggers and my strategies for coping here. One important step was cutting my hair short. Read about my exploration of my gender expression here.
Yes, I have noticed a significant improvement in my resilience and fatigue levels and I’m hoping that these and my sense of wholeness will continue to improve as I come out to more people.
Yes, I have some ways to communicate my identity to others though I am still working on this one.

Still Working On…

Coming out to people slowly, including my family
Introducing myself as Meaghan Ray or just Ray in queer spaces
Managing the physical discomfort that comes from wearing a binder so I can wear it as often as I feel the need to

Looking Ahead

Fears about dysphoria during pregnancy and early motherhood and how to manage it (I’m not pregnant yet but hope to be in the near future)
Being a non-binary parent

What have you learned about yourself in the last 6 months? What fears did you have before starting your own gender exploration process? How has your understanding of your own gender changed since you started to explore it more consciously? Leave a comment below and tell me your story!

Dealing with Frustration

WHY FRUSTRATION?

It feels like frustration has become my default setting. Frustration is a result of having a goal but having minimal progress towards that goal. It’s a feeling of stagnation, of constantly coming up against immovable barriers and being powerless to make a difference. The more important the goal is to you or the bigger the effect that the goal will have on your life, the more urgently you want it and the less you can tolerate stagnation without becoming overwhelmed frustration.

During various stages in my husband’s transition we had to wait for medical and legal systems to change, creep up a waitlist, wait for the physical changes to happen that come with HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy, in Jake’s case, testosterone), or wait for people to start using the correct name and pronouns. For myself, I find that the more dysphoria I feel, the less resilient to life’s stressors I am. I am less patient and more easily frustrated, especially when gender related topics or situations come up.

I have developed a number of strategies for dealing with or minimizing frustration that I thought I’d share with you. I have a couple general strategies, a couple for dealing with the waiting and frustrations associated with transitioning, and a couple for minimizing the increase in frustration due to dysphoria. I hope you find them useful.

GENERAL STRATEGIES

Get Enough Sleep

When I haven’t been getting enough sleep I am tired, cranky, and my brain hasn’t had enough time to recover from one day’s stress so it bleeds into the next day. I have to drink more caffeine to get through my day which makes me jittery. These effects are strongest when I haven’t had enough sleep, but are also present if I didn’t sleep at the right time (went to bed late and slept in), even if I slept for 8+ hours.

Suggestion: try tracking your sleep patterns and your mood, frustration level, energy level, or whatever symptoms you experience personally. Try planning your sleep as a part of your day just like you would with other important tasks.

Exercise

Frustration is a stagnant feeling. It is a holding of tension that has nowhere to go. For me, exercise helps. It gives me a feeling of getting that tension or energy moving and expelling it in a functional way. Some people accomplish the same thing by cleaning. I have found a base level of cardio exercise per week helps decrease the day to day frustration level and doing a harder weights workout helps if there is something specific that triggered a build up of frustration. I feel like martial arts or boxing would also serve the same purpose though I haven’t tried these personally.

Suggestion: try building exercise into your weekly plan if it isn’t already. Start at a level that feels ridiculously easy to accomplish and only increase the goal when you’ve been able to accomplish it three weeks in a row. Increase it by no more than 10% at a time. Try different types of exercise and note their effects on your mental and emotional state. When you have an increase in frustration, fatigue, anxiety, or whatever it is that you experience, schedule in the type of exercise that helps you manage that symptom the most. See my post At the Gym for my own exploration of exercise and dysphoria.

FRUSTRATION WITH WAITING

Get Involved

If you have the energy and time to do so, getting involved in changing the systems that are in your way can give a sense of purpose to your struggle and decrease the frustration. However, burning yourself out with advocacy will not help deal with frustration so be careful not to overextend. Advocacy doesn’t have to mean petitions or lobbying the government. It can mean volunteering at your local LGBT center, offering to do a presentation or review the policies at your workplace, or writing a blog.

Find a Project to Work On

Frustration is a result of a feeling of stagnation. You want to be seeing progress on something but you aren’t so you feel frustrated. It is a build up of tension and has nowhere to go. So find something else to focus on that you enjoy that will give you a sense of progress. Projects that involve learning new skills, are creative in nature, result in a shareable product or provide a helpful service for others, and can be broken down into small steps (frequently accomplishing milestones gives the best sense of progress). I find creative projects the most beneficial. You can pour your frustration onto the page, into a drawing or painting, or into a piece of music.

MORE EASILY FRUSTRATED DUE TO DYSPHORIA

Authentic Experiences

Seek out or create opportunities where you can be yourself and feel comfortable. Hang out with people that you are ‘out’ to. Spend time with people that have similar experiences or identities to you. Engage in activities that don’t trigger dysphoria or relate to your gender at all (gender non-specific activities). You read more about my own search for authentic experiences here: Finding Sources of Support and Experimenting with My Name and Pronouns.

Optimize Management of Dysphoria

Explore the specific sources of your dysphoria and develop as many strategies strategies for decreasing or managing your dysphoria as you can. For me, this process involved three stages: explore my identity, track and identify sources of dysphoria, and trial variations in gender expression to develop management strategies. Dara Hoffman-Fox’s book You and Your Gender Identity: A guide to discovery walks you through this process in a methodical process that I found very helpful. I have written about my experiences with this process in My Initial Gender Exploration Process, My Experiences with Gender Dysphoria and Euphoria, My Physical vs. Social Sense of Gender. I hope those posts will help you with this strategy.

Do you experience frustration the way I do or for similar reasons? How do you deal with frustration? Have you used similar strategies to the ones I describe above? Do you have other strategies that I didn’t mention that have worked for you? Leave a comment below! Your strategies may work better than mine do for someone else!

Finding Support

Whether you’re the one trying to figure out your gender or you partner is questioning theirs, you need a support system. This can come in many forms. Below are a few of the types of support I have found useful.

I think of support as a two way street. Ways that you are participating, communicating with others, where they know who you are. I think of resources as something you look at where the person who put it out there doesn’t know who you are. This post is about support. If you’re looking for resources, also useful but less personal, see my resources page.

Friends

Especially early on in the process, finding one good friend who can be a sounding board is extremely helpful. Having someone to tell your fears and thoughts and confusion to eases the internal pressure and helps you feel less alone. They can provide support, be a resource, help you clarify your thoughts, and help you experiment with a different name or presentation. They can be a shopping buddy if you’re looking for a new wardrobe. If they are more familiar with the queer community in your local area than you are they can help you connect to other types of support.

Before my husband came out to the world as trans, he came out to a mutual friend so that I would have someone to talk to. This friend helped me clarify how I was feeling and test out how I would respond to the questions I would likely get from others. Since I’ve been exploring my own gender identity, my husband has been my sounding board. As someone who also experiences dysphoria he is invaluable for commiserating or suggesting management strategies.

queer community

The queer community is where you’ll find people who have a better understanding of the language, experiences, and fear you might have. Queer events give you a safe place to be who you are, express your identity, and use whatever labels, name, or pronouns you want. Just having a safe place to be can be a big relief. Leaving these places can feel like putting your mask back on or going back in the closet so it’s nice to know when the next event/meet up will be so you have something to look forward to.

I have found the queer community very helpful since I came out as gay. I have always needed to be around people who have similar experiences and understand what I’m going through. We were initially part of a queer sports league which was great for exercise as well as queer time. Community became even more important when my husband came out as trans but we found that we had to find different groups that had a more trans focus. I have also been part of a queer choir which again, is great for getting time around queer people as well as keeping music in my life. Often these activity-focused queer groups are the nicest because the support and camaraderie are there but you don’t have to tell your life story to everyone or talk about what’s currently going on. Sometimes, talking is too difficult and all you need is the support.

Online groups

These are great. There are facebook groups for everything imaginable. Some of them are closed and you need to ask to join. Some of them are hidden and you need an invite from someone in the group (which is easiest to get by meeting people in the queer community or participating in similar online groups that have overlapping members). These groups give you a place to post questions, rant about a bad experience, celebrate milestones that other people wouldn’t understand the significance of, or just read what other people have been saying.

I’ve been part of online groups for our local trans/NB community, partners of trans men, genderfluid people, etc. There are groups dedicated to top surgery, bottom surgery, and HRT. Both my husband and I have used these groups to ask questions of others that have already gone through what were going through and provide support to others that are just starting something that we’ve already done. Some groups we are in separately and some we are in together. On days that were harder, I would check the group I liked the best almost hourly to feel a connection with other people who understood. I wish I had found these groups earlier in his transition process but I still find them useful today.

PFLaG

PFLaG stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. There are support groups all over North America. It may not seem politically correct or very inclusive but as it turns out, the support group in our area is mainly trans focused and very well run. This group is designed to take people from not accepting to accepting to celebrating their own or their loved one’s identities. The group includes people of all LGBT identities as well as friends and family. The discussion is different every time and includes whatever topics people want to discuss. We get the perspective of other people going through the process, friends who are trying to be good supporters, parents who are struggling to understand, siblings who are trying to build a new bond, and sometimes health professionals who want to be more inclusive.

This was one of the first sources of support we found. The group near us runs once a month. It was big enough that we could sit and listen without having to participate if we didn’t want to. No matter what was discussed we always got something out of it. It was like a release of pressure, an emotional breath of fresh air. During the harder months we would measure time based on how long it was until the next PFLaG meeting.

A few meetings in someone mentioned another PFLaG meeting near us at the opposite time in the month. For a couple of months we went to both. This second meeting was quite a bit smaller which pretty much required participation. At some point my husband couldn’t make one of the smaller meetings so I went by myself and ended up talking about a bunch of the stuff that I didn’t want to burden him with (mainly my anxiety about how he was really doing, fears about the possibility of him getting beaten up, my observations of the toll that coming out was taking on his mental health, etc). We decided that it was a good idea for me to have my own separate group to go to, especially since I was getting more out of the groups at this point than he was. So we would go to the bigger group together (whenever possible) and I could go to the smaller group by myself when I felt like I needed to. I continued going for about a year but eventually didn’t need as much support. We have continued going to the larger group for nearly 3 years and I have been helping to run a separate group every third month specifically for partners of trans people.

Lately, I have been finding the group helpful in providing support through my own gender discovery journey. Even once life is not specifically about our personal gender experiences we will likely still be attending just to have somewhere to be where the majority of people understand this aspect of our lives and so that we can provide support to others that are just starting the process.

therapists

Finding a trans-friendly therapist is very important. Some therapists present themselves as trans-knowledgeable, trans-positive, or trans-friendly but, as we have learned from friends in our various groups, some are operating from a very old and transphobic play-book. The best way to find a truly trans-positive therapist is to get a recommendation from someone in the community who is further along in the process than you are. When you are just starting out you don’t necessarily know what it means to be trans-positive. Only in discussing the things that your therapist has said to you with others in the community will you get the perspective that you need. Sometimes the therapist has already done serious damage to the person’s sense of self-worth.

A good rule of thumb in my book is that if you are coming away from therapy with more guilt, shame, fear, confusion, self-hatred, and dysphoria, this is not a good therapist for you to be seeing. Look online. Find support groups. Find friends that you can talk to. Ask around for recommendations. If you have a local queer community centre, ask them for recommendations. If the therapist they recommended was the one that made you feel worse, stop going anyway. There are other resources and other therapists out there that can help. Check out my resources page for some other options.

trans-friendly health professionals

These are rare in our experience. As a trans person you will need to receive care from family doctors, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, pharmacists, dentists, specialists (gynecologists, proctologists, fertility docs, speech therapists, physiotherapists), and surgeons. The more times you interact with a health professional that is not trans friendly the less likely you are to access health care the next time you need it. Finding trans-friendly and trans-knowledgeable health professionals is not only going to help you get through your transition but also take away a big source of stress. Finding trans-friendly professionals is easiest by asking your support groups.

Trans-friendly and trans-knowledgeable family doctors are especially rare and so much in demand that our community filled up the caseload of three family doctors in a row as they were suggested to the group. If you are a healthcare professional or you know of one that might be open to learning more about trans care and trans issues, give them/look up as many resources as you can. Spreading this information is one of the best things allies can do.

What are your support systems? How did you find trans-friendly therapists and other health professionals? Leave a comment below!

At the Gym

I have always been an athletic person. I played baseball right from T-ball to high school, soccer in middle school, and was generally an outdoorsy kid climbing trees and exploring the woods around our cottage. I learned to swim, canoe, ski, and skate at our cottage, and learned how to sail, kayak, and ride horses at summer camp. This is where I first discovered archery which became my focus throughout high school and into university. Eventually life got in the way and I stopped training which also meant I became less fit and less active. In graduate school I briefly got involved in rowing and quickly remembered what I liked about learning new sports and being active. Then I moved and it’s been hard to keep up with. Now-a-days, in order to stay fit I have to go to the gym to workout. This is a very different experience from what I was used to growing up, especially with dysphoria added on top.

Gyms and other traditional workout spaces are not very friendly environments for people with dysphoria. There are change rooms separated into male and female, mirrors, revealing or fitted clothing, and a focus on your body which may be the greatest source of your discomfort. But at the same time, people who experience dysphoria often struggle with their mental health as a result and would greatly benefit from regular physical activity. Or maybe, being athletic is a part of their identity that is something stable that they can focus on when everything else feels like it’s in flux.

I enjoy working out at the gym. It makes me feel strong, satisfied, relaxed, alert, and more in tune with my body. It gives me a positive way to focus on my body and the strength in it instead of the ways it sometimes feels wrong. Working out at the gym is one of the best ways for me to relieve some of the tension that builds up from constant frustration, dysphoria, and safety math. I use the female change room but there is a gender neutral washroom down the hall that I could use if I want to. The gym is small and has mirrors along one wall which I avoid facing when I have more dysphoria. I generally wear a fitted sports bra and a loose shirt and basketball shorts or board shorts.

For some reason, different activities at the gym make me feel different aspects of my gender. On the female side there is steady, long duration cardio, lighter weights, core exercises, stretching, and pilates or yoga type exercises. On the male side there is heavier weights, more intense short duration cardio, and plyometric or agility type exercises. In the neutral category is balance, combination exercises, and interval type cardio.

Those lists of activities seem pretty stereotypical. To be clear, I am not suggesting that specific types of exercise are gendered in any way, just that this is how they feel to me and the effect they have on my gender. Not everyone will experience physical activity as having anything to do with their gender.

I’m not really surprised that my experience of my gender while working out is affected by stereotypes. Most of our experiences are in some ways. But knowing how different activities interact with my sense of my gender allows me to choose activities strategically. I can pick activities that will be in line with my current experience of my gender to minimize dysphoria. Or I can pick activities that balance out my experience of my gender. Typically this means picking activities that help me feel more masculine to offset being identified solely as female in my day-to-day life.

So, the majority of the time, I prefer the activities from the ‘masculine’ list. Until recently, I hadn’t identified this preference as a gender based thing. But that is definitely a component of it. Those activities help me feel more at ease with myself and more balanced whereas the other ones accentuate feelings of dysphoria or imbalance, generally towards the female side. In order to maintain my fitness the way I’d like, I’ll have to find ways of making the more ‘feminine’ activities feel more masculine for me or pair them with other masculine activities.

I have found other forms of activity that I enjoy as well. These are often more similar to the sports I enjoyed as a kid, home workouts, or workout classes specifically for queer/trans people.

My biggest difficulty is motivation, as it is for anyone trying to form a new habit of being physically active. When my mental health is suffering I mainly experience apathy. So even though this is when I need to workout the most, I have a hard time caring enough or building up enough energy to do it. I try to hold myself accountable by finding a workout buddy who won’t let me get out of it. Once I go I always end up feeling better and having more energy and less tension than when I started. Hopefully writing that down and sending it out into the world will remind me of that the next time.

How does working out or physical activity influence your sense of your gender? Do you struggle to be physically active as a result of dysphoria, environment, or mental health? What strategies have you found that help you maintain an active lifestyle? Leave a comment below with your thoughts and experiences!